Looking at this giant poster it's apparent that Peroni have started making hats.

Just the thing to quench one's thirst on these humid and sticky days in the city.

I can just imagine the Powerpoint charts that exist to justify this approach as positioning Peroni as a chic, fashionable and premium lager that appeals to both men and women ['it's a fashion brand not a lager brand...'] but I can't help feeling that they's forgotten the most vital ingredient. The beer.

And they don't seem particularly bothered about emphasising the brand's Italian heritage either [and I'm not talking about the fact that it's most often sold with pizza in a certain high street restaurant chain].

We've banged the drum a lot about the product vs brand confusion that's plaguing modern advertising but plaudits must go to whoever got paid real money for making this campaign without an idea. Must have taken ages in creative development before the Eureka moment happened after they alighted on this scamp in the review session.

Fair play though, it's a campaign that can run and run as these 'hot off the press' next executions amply demonstrate.

As if it were gone done and did by Wes Anderson. (A Wes Anderson that hired bad actors, wasn't very good at lighting and didn't pay too much attention to colour grading.) Nevertheless it's still pretty funny.

Is it too much to ask for people to trust that David Bowie knows how to put a good tune together?

Here is a beautiful film for Samsung and the Association of Surfing Professionals by 72 and Sunny - not sure its a great ad, or even an ad atall - but it's pretty. It makes me think surfing is cool. I still think Samsung make gimicky shit.

This 'whispy-bint-with-plinky-plonky-piano-cover-version-shortcut-to-poigniancy' malarkey is a plague on Advertising.

The nice people at Harpers Wine & Spirit Review published this piece online last Friday. We thought it was worth giving it a bit more bit oxygen here on our home turf.

There is a prevailing school of thought in
the advertising business that to change consumer behaviour you first need to
change consumer attitudes [and by consumer behaviour we mean getting people to
buy stuff].

This is baloney.

In reality, it is actual usage and
consumption that is the thing that ultimately drives and shapes somebody’s
attitude to a brand.

Consumers know much more about brands that
they buy and use more frequently. Hence, attitudes and brand beliefs tend to
reflect behavioural loyalty and purchasing patterns rather than operating as
the things that stimulate them.

It’s a classic case of confusing cause with
effect.

It’s not “I buy it because I like the
brand”.

More “I like the brand because I buy it”

Unlike the chicken and egg, we know what
came first. And it wasn’t a change in attitudes.

And it’s this mistake that’s leading
agencies to produce a certain kind of advertising that treats consumers as
feelgood-chasing, mouth-breathing morons who are bereft of any logic and reason
when it comes to making choices about brands.

That can’t be a good thing, can it?

The belief that you must create an
emotional bond with an audience to get them to love your brand and connect with them before they can consider
buying seems to be treated like gospel.

The obsession that you need to reposition
an audience’s mind before you can move them closer to buying a product seems to
be treated like some kind of immutable law.

Why is this?

Well, for one thing, this kind of
advertising is in fashion right now and is the only kind of advertising that most
agencies want to make.

They cherry-pick whatever findings they
want to from the world of behavioural science and cognitive psychology to
justify their approach to creativity.

This usually ends up with fluffy,
happy-clappy advertising desperate to own
some kind of emotional territory.

This kind of advertising comes from their over-riding
obsession with focusing exclusively on generating brand love to create a connection with an audience, rather than any overt
focus on why the product might actually be of help, use or benefit.

And therein lies the problem.

Most agencies have forgotten what the point
of advertising is.

Selling is now a dirty word in Adland.

If you’re not using advertising to give
more people a reason to buy your product more often, then you’re not using
advertising properly.

Despite this seeming like incontestable and
uncontroversial common sense, this point of view is regarded as heresy by many.

The insanity loop continues as agencies
continue to exclusively focus on what can they say about a brand to get people
to like it rather than asking what can they say about a product to get people
to buy it.

And so out come the kittens to supposedly
manipulate the emotions of an audience lacking the intelligence and free will
to make any kind of purchasing decision based on reasoning or logic.

There used to be a deal with consumers.

We knew we were using advertising to sell
something.

They knew we were using advertising to sell
something.

They were prepared to give us their
precious time and attention, and maybe would even consider to be persuaded to
buy that thing, if we entertained them with our message.

We would feature the product at the heart
of this message and show in some way how it might help them or how they might
benefit from having that in their life in some small way.

There was honesty, truth, integrity and
transparency in this deal.

Everyone knew where they stood. Nobody was
hiding anything.

Nowadays, it seems that that this deal no
longer stands.

It’s de
riguer to not even bother featuring a client’s product in a commercial. A
logo bolted on to the end of some disingenuous, generic piece of film that
could be for anything will suffice, thank you very much.

The post-rationalisation going on from
Kahneman’s System Thinking that mistakenly assumes there is no place for
rational or conscious decision-making has turned advertising into an industry
of confidence tricksters.

Despite the proclamations of companies
being organised to be completely customer-centric, nobody seems to be asking
what the customer might actually want from advertising or how it might actually
help them.

It seems that it is acceptable business to even
disguise what is being advertised by not just plonking a logo at the end of an
ad. It’s hardly surprising that we find ourselves in a situation where trust is
eroded between clients and agencies [as well as between advertisers and
consumers].

The tenure of the average relationship has
shrunk to just under three years. Is it really any wonder when agencies
steadfastly refuse to embrace the fact that they are actually in the business
of selling?

Agencies are now a safe haven for
pseudo-scientists, cod psychologists and wannabe sociologists all seduced by
the intellectual stimulus provided by trying to get people to think something rather than trying to
get people to do something.

It’s also much, much easier to get swept
along by the allure of producing the kind of advertising that springs from the
objective of changing attitudes and owning emotions. It’s also much, much
easier to produce than a compelling piece of advertising that is actually true
to the product.

Advertising an attitude. It’s the “just add
water” method of creative development. Get yourself a Thesaurus, scour the
zeigeist for a cultural trend, stroke your chin and think deep about some
inner-directed values that your audience would aspire to and bingo you’ll have a list of meaningless adjectives to
write ads about.

Agencies will claim that advertising an attitude or an
emotion that your brand can own is essential to help differentiation. All
products are the same, we live in a parity world, so the argument goes.

Their party line is that it’s the emotional
battleground is where brands fight it all out. It’s what people feel that’s all-important, not what they
think.

We live in an age where companies spend
millions of pounds just broadcasting brand positionings in the vain hope that
their target audience will identify and connect with them. Agencies are
brainwashing clients that there is no need to impart any relevant or useful
information about the product as people just aren’t creatures of reason.

This obsession with chasing some kind of
brand love is rarely reciprocated from a consumer perspective. They just don’t
care about brands anywhere near as much as people who work in advertising
agencies and marketing departments. And anyway, it’s bloody difficult for
anyone to love a brand they haven’t actually consumed [also, isn’t it a pretty
big degradation of the word love?].

It’s also eminently possible to buy a
product without actually liking the brand.

I’m an o2 customer. I’ve got a tariff that
seems fair enough.Price-wise and
service-wise, I think they’re OK. I do not, however, want to “Be More Dog”.

I like a nice pint of Guinness. Especially
from establishments where I know it’s going to be poured well in a proper glass
and left to settle properly. When I’m drinking it I do not consider it to
signal to surrounding pub clientele that I am in fact “Made of More”.

I have never wanted any kind of emotional relationship
with my bank and never will. So, my money is safe with my existing provider and
I refused to be swayed by Santander’s charms and their claim that they are “A
Bank For Your Ideas”.

In Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow, he demonstrates that most brand attitudes are very
weak and rarely recalled. From extensive research he concludes that the
influence of attitudes on behaviour is astonishingly weak while the influence
of behaviour on attitude is very strong. Sharp found that when asking regular brand buyers about their
feelings towards a brand only 10% see it as different or unique. So, even
people who purchase and use a brand regularly struggle to see it as being truly
different.

Most buying decisions are made from what is
a relatively narrow consideration set for any category. In Sharp’s view, the
real battle of brands is not differentiation, it is to get into this
consideration set by making advertising that is distinctive and consistent.

This leads to a very different model of
advertising.

A model that recognises that consumers are
not as controlled and dominated by their emotions as agencies like to
think.A model that credits
consumers with intelligence and recognises that they are capable of making rational
decisions, much more than they’re given credit for.

Brand associations are important but they
should be based on characteristics that are important and relevant to the
category and product.

However, there’s a current line of
fashionable thinking permeating Adland that seems to misinterpret Sharp’s work
and the findings of neuroscience to blanketly and blindly dismiss any kind of role for the product in
helping to build memory structures that relate to decision-making.

People often tend to make out that featuring
the product at the heart of the advertising idea makes you Rosser Reeves
incarnate. That’s just lazy thinking because it doesn’t automatically mean you
have to have rational USP based communication if your advertising makes the
product the star of the show.

It’s not as black and white as product =
bad, emotions = good. Great advertising should do both.

It is
possible to put the product at the heart of an advertising idea and
generate important emotional associations at the same time.

Changing consumer behaviour without first changing
attitudes isn’t some kind of rare event. By and large, it’s how the world
works.

Showing a product in a great light can make a difference. Advertising can work —that is, to stimulate sales—by presenting
motivating news or associations about a product.

It’s very dangerous to assume that there
are any laws of advertising.

But it’s an even more dangerous assumption
that advertising should work to change attitudes first rather than work to
change behaviour.

One of the main stories on Marketing Week today was that Hovis are 'fostering a more lifestyle-oriented positioning through social media to elevate bread from being a carrier of fillings to the "wholesome" role it plays in peoples lives'
Elevate bread? Elevate bread?

Jesus wept.

Putting aside the serious question as to how this revelation actually constitutes news in one of the country's foremost marketing publications, this seems like just another depressing example of a client being taken on a social media wild goose chase.

You can read the whole article here if you can be bothered but the gist is that posts like 'Mum's dinnertime rules [No mobile phones at the dinner table!]' are hoped to illicit a stronger emotional and nostalgic reaction from fans, pushing them to share these posts with others.

To put it into some sort of context, Hovis currently has the grand total of 2,808 followers on Twitter.
Now that's not exactly a massive audience or demographic when viewed in pure propensity-to-purchase-bread terms is it?.

I'm sure every one one of those followers is no doubt hooked on the fun and wholesome chat lighting up their social media world but in the grand scheme of things this activity is little more than dust in the wind.

God knows how much time, effort and money must have gone into this re-positioning charade, but preaching to the converted to get them to share more posts really won't move the needle when it comes to impacting on things that matter like, er, sales.

Hovis is a great brand with a history of great advertising. But taking this kind of misplaced, desperate approach seriously undermines their credibility.

I'd wager that there is no shortage of better, more relevant, interesting 'lifestyle-oriented content' on this thing called the internet. Does anybody that commissioned this activity really, really believe in the heart of hearts that people will seek out and gravitate towards Hovis as an authority in this area.

It's bread for fuck's sake. Not Time Out.

In the grand scheme of all the many things in people's lives, it's a low interest category.

No amount of well-written Facebook Posts and 140 character tweets is ever going to change the fact that most people don't really give that much of a shit about bread.

I give you, Exhibit A, the fiasco of the unsuccessful and long-since binned Kingsmill Confessions campaign as prima facie evidence that people do not want to engage or interact with a company that makes things you can make sandwiches out of.

Just because you can have a social media presence, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

If I was them, I'd ditch all this nonsense and just put the money into sampling instead.

Who knows? Getting people to actually try the product might just be more commercially successful than getting people to share 'wholesome' content with each other.

Brand makes some really good points here regarding advertising today. I know many a creative or planner will be screaming "he just doesn't get it". Well I think he kind of does.

As mood films become advertising more and more all ads look more and more alike.

And people in advertising will work harder and harder to explain that these emotional pieces work best, even if the consumer can't remember a) who it was for and b) why they should buy the stuff.

I'm not sure what to say about Bob Dylan in the Chrysler ads. Maybe the answer is blowing about somewhere.

But then Russell has made some ads before for HP and I don't think they are too bad actually. Not earth shattering but in the same way Chrysler has the legend Dylan in them that will help re-call so HP had Brand to make their ad memorable. The ads are product demos really, what's so wrong with that? As long as they are done in an entertaining and cheeky way,as Brand does best.

We have become confused about what 'craft' or creativity is in advertising.

Advertising creative craft at its best isn't merely styling, or thinking up a funny or entertaining thing with the product somehow involved – yes they are things that many amateurs or "kids in Australia" [reference to a Doritos ad] can do.

But that isn't good advertising creative craft, and probably that Doritos ad isn't really good advertising, it's just funny, or entertaining.

Proper, great, advertising creative craft is about searching for that thing in the product or service that will mean something to the consumer, it is about understanding what the consumer wants, what will motivate them, understand how people work, how they decide, and putting all this together in compelling ways that show the consumer what's in for them, in ways that are engaging, interesting, unexpected, relevant, intelligent and memorable, that are robust and enduring, that build companies and grow brands over time by getting more people to buy more product or service more often.

That is advertising creativity.
It is only because we underestimate and misunderstand what real advertising creativity is, that we think "anyone can do it".

Proper advertising creativity isn't just creativity.

But the industry has downgraded a whole generation of creatives to merely being being stylists and producers of branded entertainment.

Advertising will not get itself out of the confusing fug it is in until we reverse that trend and remember what proper advertising creative craft is, and understand and re-engage with the value it can give to business, be proud and confident about it, and put that thing back in the centre of the business.

Paddy McGuinness has never struck me as a man burdened by an overflow of good material. And to his credit, he doesn't appear to let that worry him. After all, he's managed to get through seven (yes, seven) series of Take Me Out with a single joke.

But this video reveals something new. A chink in the armour of Paddy's previously impenetrable front. There is definitely something in the eyes that gives away that he's thinking what we're thinking - namely that the material in this is thinner than a slice of cake served in a Yorkshire teashop.

So this is Branded Content, is it? The brave new world of advertising. The thing that people like The Drum, the Sunday Sport of advertising news, keep crapping on about.

And the worst thing is, there's more of it. What were they thinking?

Here is the news again, for all of those brand loonies, brand managers and me-too marketing idiots: people don't care. They don't care about your brand, they don't care about what you care about, and they certainly don't give two shits about your crappy debate.

We're going to be seeing and hearing a lot more of those words in the coming months. Especially now that's there's even a specially dedicated Wearable Technology store on Amazon where you can buy revolutionary things like watches, pedometers and a smart sports vest that can monitor the amount of cheese you eat.

I'll reserve judgement on whether this will be the next big thing but I can't help feeling that Microsoft are one step ahead of the game with their "phone charging pants".

God knows how much time and money they must have put into this project. I'm sure it'll be seeing a payback some time in 2675.

This wasn't some kind of spoof story on The Onion or one of those irritating corporate April Fool's Day jokes. It was actually written up as a proper story here on Forbes who've clearly got their finger on the pulse on current trends in the world of business/got nothing better to write about.

Now, I'm very well aware of the pitfalls of asking people what they want from technology because they just don't know. The Henry Ford quote of "If I'd have asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse" being a neat summation of this case in point.

However, smart people at the forefront of technology do sometimes get things wrong.

Watch this space.

And keep your eyes out for Nokia's heat sensitive socks that can translate menus into Klingon.